Jinja

Jinja is situated on the edge of Lake Victoria and at the source of the White Nile. We spent three nights here and it was well needed after all the travel I have done. When we arrived the manager showed us a video and explained all of the activities we could do while we stayed in Jinja. As a group we chose to do a sunset boat cruise on the first evening. We were collected at 5pm by a boat which had plenty of drinks and finger food. Unfortunately the clouds were in so we only got a brief glimpse of the sunsetting. Nevertheless I learned a lot about life living by the River Nile from the tour guides. They explained that the government built two dams on either side of Jinja for power production however instead of 150 megabits of energy being produced, as planned, only 20 megabits are actually produced. This has annoyed locals as there was a lot of money spent on these dams without any true benefits. The other problem is that the level of the river has risen as a result of the dams and the river has a reduction in fish population due to over fishing.

After the boat cruise Francis, Del, Kye and myself went to the bar to play uno while we (or more I) asked Francis a lot of questions. The winner of each uno game had to demonstrate their dancing skills. I was on a winning role so my Irish dancing moves were on show a lot.

The following day I went for a run along the main road and I nearly caused multiple motorbike accidents as the motorbikes slowed down to look at a "Muzungo" running on their streets. After lunch I spent the afternoon in the spa. I decided to treat myself to a massage, manicure and pedicure as I felt after seventy days on the road I needed some TLC. The full body massage was interesting as the lady had some interesting massage techniques. She pulled on all my limbs nearly dislocating them. I'm not sure how calming it was but for $20 it an interesting experience. Before dinner I did a yoga class overlooking the Nile. It was a nice combination between stretching, core exercises and balancing exercises. It felt very good to exercise again properly after all those long truck drives.

The final day I did whitewater rafting with Kye and it was organised by Nile River Explorers. We drove thirty minutes to the start of the rapids. There was four in our boat including our guide Josh. Josh explained that the rafting can be either grade three or grade five rapids depending line we take into the rapids. We decided to do the grade five rapids as "go big or go home". Josh talked us through what to do during the rapids and if the boat turned over. The first rapid we nearly flipped which shocked us all and then on the second rapid we fully flipped, this scared Kye as he was caught under the boat for about five seconds. The aim for the rest of the rapids was to stay in the boat. We got to swim down the last rapid which was fun as the current was pretty strong and it took us down the river quickly. In total we travelled twenty kilometers down the river before the end of the trip. We were all hungry and tired after the rafting and were glad to be given a chicken wrap and beer at the bus to celebrate completing the rafting journey. After dinner we had a final game of uno (Kye won overall winner) before saying goodbye to Del and Kye. They made us all laugh so much over the last nine days that we were all sad to leave them. However we head back to Kenya to finish our tour in two days so its the start of saying goodbye to my African travel family.Read more